Fauré's Piano Quartets

Collected-works volumes are now selling for increasingly higher prices relative to the price of bread due at least in part to the declining market for such publications. And the increasing prices are in turn decreasing the number of libraries and individuals who would once have purchased these editions as a matter of course. Students at small colleges, or local musicians taking advantage of their medium-sized public library would have at one time had easy access to the Fauré Oeuvres complètes, but shrinking collections budgets in libraries everywhere has limited students' and performers' access to important repertoire in reliable and accurate editions. The good news is that many publishers, including Bärenreiter, are issuing associated practical editions of scores and parts to be used for performance. These practical editions provide the critical edition of the score as it appears in the volume of the Oeuvres complètes, Gesamtausgabe, or Collected Works, usually with a brief introduction and the essential critical notes. Musicians can now mark up the cheaper performing edition for their performance or analysis rather than the expensive collected-works volumes. This certainly makes librarians happy.

The two piano quartets by Gabriel Fauré published in series 5, volume 2, in the much needed Oeuvres complètes have been issued in such separate editions. (So that the bibliographical headnote to this brief review does not exceed the length of the review itself, I did not include there the complete information on these editions, but in short: Piano Quartet op. 15, score and parts, BA 7903, i39.95; and Piano Quartet op. 45, score and parts, BA 7904, i 39.95.) Similar to the editions of Ravel as mentioned above, Fauré's compositions were not well treated by their original publishers. Errors in first and early editions—prolifically reprinted, reproduced, and now digitized and online—are abundant. Further, poor quality paper used by many publishers, but particularly French ones, throughout the twentieth century ensured that a copy of, for example, Debussy's Préludes purchased midcentury and used for practice and performance became unusable by the 1980s. Pristine copies of first editions of these works from the turn of the century (if the often scant publication information enables a scholar to ascertain which issue is indeed the first edition), are quite rare. Scores, after all, should be made to be used, but not necessarily used up. Accurate editions and excellent production values make these separate publications invaluable. They should last awhile in conservatories and libraries with active instrumentalists, and are well formatted for practical use.

These two quartets nicely represent the evolution of Fauré's style over his life from the more melodic and tonal to an increasingly chromatic and abstract manner with less emphasis on melody. The First Piano Quartet is squarely in the earlier manner, the Second Quartet a step in Fauré's journey toward the latter, epitomized by his last completed work, the String Quartet, op. 121. Due to this stylistic evolution, early works of Fauré are more commonly performed than the more abstract later ones, and this is true of these two piano quartets. Anyone unfamiliar with these works will be surprised by the muscular first movement of the First Quartet and, in both quartets, the "French" scherzos, as movements of the style and nature found here are sometimes called. These are not easy works, and both require a high degree of technique to perform well. The piano parts display Fauré's rather queer and distinctive writing for the piano, the result of the ambidexterity that allowed the composer...